Production has begun on the first Scatterplot book. This book will contain all comics presented in a vertical format, from November of 2001 through December of 2003. The book will be printed in black and white.

January of 2004 saw the first page-format strips, and marks the point at which the comics will be printed in color for the second book. A black-and-white edition of that book will likely also be available.

I have some questions about the process to anyone who's ever done a book in Lulu, or anyone that's familiar with scripting to create image files:

1) How well, if at all, does the black-and-white print format handle greyscales?

2) I have a large number of 3000x10000 pixel images which I would like to place two at a time into 6900x9500 images with white backgrounds. Of each pair, one would have its upper left corner at (0, -500) and the other one would have its upper left corner at (3900, -500). (I'm cutting off the headers.) Does anyone know a happy scripting method to do this? At present, I would have to paste each strip individually into the new image, carefully aligning the edges each time, and I've got 190-some comics in that format to deal with.

Anyway. Balticon got me really excited about a number of projects. Among them are the card game ideas I've been kicking around in my head, and the new webcomic project I've been contemplating. But I've decided that I will not start in earnest on the webcomic project until the Scatterplot books are assembled. Hence, my work on the book now.

Also, so that I can publish as high-quality a book as possible, I request that you consider doing some transcription work on Scatterplot. Mainly, what I'm concerned about is catching errors in the comic, be they textual or visual. Alternately, if you don't want to bother with the transcription, feel free to email me or post a comment in my LJ to inform me of any errors you see.

Hey, now -- I don't remember seeing that guide before! Maybe it was linked in a post you went back and edited and I didn't see, lol, but this is the first time I've seen it.

So, awesome, I'll start with the helping thing. ;)

And, haha, not so much the looking for stuff to do while bored today -- it's BUSY. Ann's newhire class is starting to handle stuff, so the mentors aren't taking calls, they're helping! But I enjoy helping you, so I want to know what will be most helpful for you. :)